


sitting in a field at dawn

by MakeAStriderSmile



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Love Confessions, M/M, POV Second Person, because i was in that sort of mood, i've literally forgotten how to tag fics, set post 159, so spoilers for that i guess, well kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 18:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21613426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakeAStriderSmile/pseuds/MakeAStriderSmile
Summary: Set post-159, in a hazy inbetween before 160 (if you want to pretend it never happened then you can because I sure am)Jon thinks about something Martin said to him there, in the Lonely, and can't seem to take his mind off it. He goes for a walk, and there's some soft sappy shit because I need them desperately to be happy.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 5
Kudos: 116





	sitting in a field at dawn

" _I really loved you, you know?_ " 

It plays on your mind as you watch him, curled into a too small bed, fitted with too tight sheets fraying at the edges, scented lightly with the chemical sort of tang of cleaning products. You watch him and think, 'do you love me still? Was it all just taken away in there on that lonely plane?'

You wonder why you care. You shouldn’t care. You are no longer human, and you shouldn’t care that a man no longer loves you. His hair feathers dark across the pillow, soft strands of dark curling unruly against his face, a face you watch so closely and you ache to see the softness of it because even after it all, the world cannot take the softness out of Martin Blackwood, cannot pull the tenderness from his very core, surrounded by the strongest of steel. 

(Melanie had told you in halting sentences. Told you about how she'd found him, hunched into himself, forcing his eyes to stop betraying the way Elias had torn him to pieces. You had seen him after Jane, eyes sunken and fever bright. You had seen him, through it all, and he had never stopped being brave.)

(You wonder when you stopped being brave and started being suicidal. Which mark did fear leave on you that scarred you soul deep and left you unable to rouse yourself from the depths of a practiced apathy you only recently started actually feeling? At least until he needed you, anyway.)

You do not sleep, because you find yourself entirely unable to, these days. You sit there in a tiny stone safe house in Scotland, knees pulled to your chest, clad in shapeless sleepwear meant for someone larger than you, grey sleeves hanging round your skinny wrists, and Lord, you hope the stain on the hem isn't blood. You sit silently, and you watch him sleep, and you wonder if he still loves you because you love him with a fierceness that terrifies you now and you're not entirely sure you could bear it if you had lost your chance somewhere between cups of tea and the coma. 

He does not wake when you uncurl rail thin limbs and crawl out from under the covers draped around your feet. He does not wake even when you slide out the door of the little cottage, deceptively charming for what Daisy had probably been using it for. 

(Basira had asked you to See her, when you came back with a shaking Martin clinging to you like he couldn't bear to let go. You did. You saw viscera and slick blood, a smile sharper than a blade. You tell Basira she is hunting. She looks deeply saddened by your answer. You look again after you're settled in, finding her settled amongst a pile of bodies, serene, as if nesting. You let Basira know, quick as you're able. The next time you look, it's all soft words and coaxing, Daisy clawing her way back to her humanity even as you wonder if you even have any left to find again.)

You walk. You don't think it's for long, but you just need to feel the push and pull of muscle, the strain and the heat. Just to know that part of you is still intact and undisturbed by your burgeoning inhumanity. 

You were never very athletic, growing up with your head buried in any number of books. You started taking up running only after Jane. The sound of worms crawling after you only makes you speed up on the treadmill you impulsively bought for your new flat. 

Now you walk all the way to a field, nondescript, the dew of early morning still clinging to the fresh grass. Fog rolls in and it feels like irony, just a little. 

It's there that you sit, just silently watching the fog roll over the grass, the rising sun catching the dew. You didn't even check the time before you left, and you kind of regret not doing it now, because you could sit here all day, just watching the fog and the rising sun. But there's no real need. Nobody is looking for you right now. Not at this very moment. No, for right now, you have the kind of freedom you've not had since you sat down in Elias Bouchard's office for a researcher position you were just barely qualified for. You are free and you plan to languish in it. 

You plan to. 

But instead you spend forty minutes dwelling, because you can hardly let things alone. You're practically incapable of it, a fact you bitterly remark to yourself. You think of the lilt of his voice, the simplicity of the words. The facts as plain as day, 'I really loved you, you know?' and maybe he doesn't anymore, and maybe you'd deserve it. What is there to love? Certainly nothing you still retain. You are less Jonathan Sims than you were when you walked into The Magnus Institute, and no, that is not a reference to the two missing ribs. (You think Martin would have laughed at the joke, even if he gave you the sad eyes afterward.)

You are less, you don't even know if you  _ are _ Jonathan Sims anymore. Can the Archivist still be a person by the time they've reached their full potential? Gertrude was a spectacular Archivist, never got bogged down in people. (Besides maybe Gerry, but you think that doesn't count. She would have been a fool, to know him and not want to take the world by storm with him. You miss him with a piercing ache that you do not expect for a young man you knew barely more than an hour.) Gertrude perhaps was different, though, so determined to give her all to the cause of stopping Rituals at any cost. (You try not to think of Michael's face. You try not to think of how much he had trusted her. You think, sometimes, that you sooner would have died than given Sasha or Tim to such a cruel end. You then wonder if what you had done to them had been any better and the pressure builds behind your skull until you're weeping again, for them. You cannot count the number of times you have cried for them, for their loss. You cry just as much, thinking that Martin could just as easily have been lost.)

(You took a beaten up Polaroid you bought on impulse one day with you. You take photos of him and you know he knows why and there is such a sadness in his eyes, but you know he takes photos of you too. You both know it's unlikely anything could take you now. But it's sweet that he cares.)

The quiet is broken. 

"Jon?!" 

It is him, and you know it is him, and you turn with a quietly pleased, "Mart-". 

You are tackled by a man near twice as tall as you, though arguably twice as broad, his voice trembling and furious as he accuses, "Where in the bloody fucking hell did you swan off to, Jon? I woke up and you were gone! No note, like we'd  _ talked  _ about leaving if we had to go out anywhere, no, you just fucked clean off! God, Jon, I thought you'd  _ left _ me here! You could have woken me before making me walk twenty minutes in my PJs to come find you just having a bloody sabbatical in some foggy field! And don't even get me started on the fog! I--"

"Do you love me, Martin?" His accusations, all understandable, mind you-- though you take issue to the swanning thing, really, does everybody think that you  _ swan _ about?-- are halted then. Your question is simple, asked so plainly and so quickly that it could honestly have been talked right over. But it was Martin, and he shut right up whenever you talked, though you didn't get why, and so you ask it again. 

"What does that have to do with you taking a wander out to some random Scottish field? You didn't even bring a tape recorder with, clearly they didn't want to follow you out while you asked ridiculous questions in borrowed pajamas." You notice he didn't answer the question, though his tone is softer than the sharp accusing tones ringing stridently across the field. You wonder if it scared some cows in the distance. You've recently decided you like cows.

(Martin’s eyes lit up as his hand sank into thick fur and he announced with a smile so similar to the old Martin, the one not touched by the Lonely, “This is a  _ very  _ good cow.” You laughed until you cried and you loved him so fiercely it ached more than the phantom pain of missing bones.)

To be fair, you've recently discovered a whole lot about yourself.

You repeat the question, amend it some. 

"Back then, you said.. you said 'I really loved you'. And I wanted to know if that changed. Do you still? Or did I miss that chance before all of the… circus nonsense and the coma and, and Tim, and-" You're perhaps rambling, thready voice barely escaping the barely there space between your faces. Wet grass tickles your neck and you suddenly wish that you hadn't cut your hair before you left for Scotland in some stupid attempt to look nondescript, as if people couldn’t spot you a mile away with your scars and burns. You suddenly wish Martin wasn't still pushing you into the grass, large warm palms curled round your bony shoulders as he just looks at you. 

His eyes are a stormy grey that they weren't, before the Lonely. And yet they are still his, still unaccountably soft and bright and staring at you the same way they used to when he would bring you tea and force you to go to lunch after everything with Jane, and Sasha, and the slow spiral into insanity that their job had become. 

You realise the answer before he says it, realise you managed to ask a question without compelling him, forcing the words out of him and you smile, because you would probably cry if you had forced those words out of him, the words weren't meant to be forced, they were natural as breathing for some people. They don't come easy to you, far from it. But for him, it's as easy as taking the hand curled around one of your shoulders, cupping your cheek and running a thumb along your cheekbone, the warmth of his hand odd against the pitted scars that dot your jaw. 

"I've loved you for ages now, Jon. You really thought a bout of self imposed isolation would make me stop? Not even you being in a bloody coma for half a year made me stop loving you. Is that what all this was about, then?" You nod, dumbly. "Course it was. Next time, how about you wake me up, alright? Honestly, I thought we'd been over this already."

"Over what?" Your voice is soft and hoarse, a little dazed. Martin loves you. It was a nice thought before, but now it's real and you're terrified because you don't deserve it, don't deserve him. 

"Over us, you nonce." His hand shifts from your face, flicks your nose, and then he helps you up and starts to walk you back to the cottage, grass stains and all. "I thought you knew when you brought me back out of the Lonely. You looked at me, you took my hand and made me See you. And I  _ saw _ you, Jon, I Saw you. I knew you loved me, and I know I love you. I figured from there it was… kind of sorted?" His voice pitches upward like a question and you know what he means. 

"You didn't want to ask about it either, in case you were wrong." You're amused and he laughs soft and warm, sheepish as he nods, the dirt and sand of the gritty road sticking to your bare feet and the moment feels almost surreal for just a minute. Just you and the man you love, the man you  _ love _ , walking back to the place you can't really call home. 

It's alright though, home isn't so much a place as it is the feeling. Home hasn't been anywhere for you for so long, so unmoored from your own humanity that you woke up feeling like the whole world was alien, and the only thing that felt like home was so vehemently against even seeing you that he actively avoided you for months. 

But now home is in a man holding your unburned hand carefully in his, so carefully that you wonder if he thinks he's holding the burned one. But then you look, and he's looking at you with such a tender wonder that you realise he knows entirely well which hand he's holding. He just finds you to be precious cargo, worth holding carefully, and you want to shake apart and come back together in that careful clutching embrace. 

You feel he'd protect you, human or not, through anything. 

Though you don't really want to give him anything to test that theory with. 

Just one week, one week of sleeping and getting used to casual touches without flinching or, in his case, literally popping out of sight just on instinct. A few days of spotting cows and taking unfocused polaroids of them, of a burned hand buried near wrist deep in fur, in a freckly forearm curled around a too skinny waist. 

Even one more day. 

You could live with one day of this, of loving and being loved. It would be too little, far too little. 

But you want to give him the chance to love you without reservations. You want the chance to love him without the fear that you're getting it all wrong, that the simplest slight will end things.

One day isn't enough, but it will suffice. Basira will have sent a few statements for you, and you can read a few, get back to full strength, and take Martin for a little walk round the village. 

Then the day after, maybe you'll make dinner. Grab something from the market, make something that you Know Martin will enjoy (cheating perhaps, but you doubt he minds terribly) and tell him you love him back, because you can't quite bring yourself to put it into words now, not while it's still so new, but with so much on the line, you have to tell him, cannot let him go again without knowing. 

But you have time. You can tell him then and watch the slow blooming smile you know he will give you. 

But for now you squeeze his hand gently, knock your shoulder into his and ask, mildly, "Fancy a bit of cowspotting tomorrow then, darling? We can make a list of them, put them on a postcard for Basira and Daisy when you head down to pick up the statements tomorrow."

And he smiles like the sun, still rising over a sleepy village in the Scottish countryside, and he tells you, "Sounds like a perfect day. First of many, hm?"

You smile back, and desperately hope it to be true. 

**Author's Note:**

> so this is my first published TMA fic but i have a few more (a library au and an au where nobody died and they played dnd) on the backburner, hope they're not too terribly out of character because i threw myself headfirst into the jonmartin pit and im so fuckin tender for these barely functional morons in love
> 
> hmu at martindeservesbetter.tumblr.com if you're hankering for more bullshit, @feraltender on twitter, art happens sometimes and i might do more now i'm finished nanowrimo
> 
> have a great day! :)


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